Past Award Winners Database

As tightly-wound as its title suggests, 1,000 Coils of Fear is a kind of double-translation, interweaving (punk) Afro-German life in communist East Germany, the hazy presence of a father in Angola, and the painful, promising lessons of Black Lives Matter in America. Layne’s debut translation superbly handles the innovative formal play of Wenzel’s original, bringing out the political realism in 1,000 Coils of Fear’s surrealism: threaded...

To read The Antarctica of Love is to feel at the mercy of emotion: of sorrow, longing, horror, hopelessness, awe at the astonishing beauty of the writing. A nameless murdered woman lingers in this world, an unwilling witness to the mostly predictable events that occur after her death. As she attempts to untether herself, and to quiet the voices that still “[crawl] like insects in the place where [her] heart once was,” she recounts her past—in part...

The Artisans sets us up for heartbreak going in: inevitably, we know, Shen Fuyu’s rural hometown will succumb to the maw of industrialization. What comes as a surprise, however, is the cacophony of joyful detail. Jeremy Tiang’s translation brilliantly captures the tenderness and wit with which Shen writes of this vanishing community and its many trials (present and historic). Tiang leads us deftly through births, deaths, political upheaval, a conspi...

Jamie Chang’s translation of Concerning My Daughter is a lapidary mapping of a woman’s courage as she negotiates shifting fissures that threaten her being. Can she dissipate the darkness of shame and accept her queer daughter? How to rescue the patient she looks after from inhumane corporate eldercare? “I am standing in the middle of it all… I haven’t caved in or fallen down.” Kim Hye-jin’s urgent tale of intern...

In this absurdist, sci-fi, short-story collection—which runs the gamut from a mother traveling

to Vietnam to seek answers about her son’s suicide, to a nun yearning to once more lead a

life imbued with purpose—queerness is at once the anchor and a gateway to so much more.

Tiffany Tsao’s masterful translation, evident in how the pulsing language soars off the page,

is a rhythmical yet tender pastiche of twelve scenario...

Life and Political Reality recounts the Bangladesh liberation war through granular neighborhood portraiture, at turns harrowing and humorous, while the novella’s mercurial temporality warns us how yesterday’s banished collaborators can return as tomorrow’s powerful. “Seeing the skulls arrayed over banana leaves, the people … imagined an exquisitely woven jamdani sari … [in which] they saw their mothers and lovers R...

Underlying claus and the scorpion is an acute sense “of how power is exercised, of vital vulnerability, of having nowhere to take refuge,” suggesting the precarious situation of the Galician language and identity against a hegemonic culture. Deftly rendered into English by Laura Cesarco Eglin, these poems move with a disquieting viscerality, like the arthropods, gastropods, and insects that inhabit (and attack) the bodies of the text and its narrato...

Forough Farrokhzad’s status as the most iconic and influential Iranian woman poet of the 20th century poses a particular challenge to a translator seeking to reach the person beyond the myth. Elizabeth T. Gray, Jr.’s limpid translations render Farrokhzad’s poems into effortless English, offering the reader a palpable sense of the poet’s defiance and intensity, vulnerability and simplicity. In this selection of forty poems, Gray masterfully carri...

Tomoyuki Endo and Forrest Gander’s meticulous collaborative translations succeed at embracing the ambiguities and retaining the ear-catching strangenesses of this career-spanning selection of work by Japan’s “far north poet.” Kido’s work converses with Eliot and Pound, whom he has translated into Japanese, as well as the “crossed streams” of contemporary Japanese and USAmerican poetry to follow. A deep knowledge of traditional Japanese cul...

Raquel Salas Rivera introduces an essential Black voice associated with the generation of mid-century Puerto Rican poets known as the Guajana Group, a wounded veteran of the Korean War who “wrote openly about his disabilities, delved into the seldom described experiences of post-war reverse migration, and left a record of regionalisms from a world that no longer exists.” Sotero Rivera Avilés was also Salas Rivera’s grandfather, and the poet-trans...

Tideline, Polish poet Krystyna Dąbrowska’s finely-observed English-language début, is translated with clarity and force by Karen Kovacik, Antonia Lloyd-Jones, and Mira Rosenthal. In “Genizah,” the poet remembers her failed “first song of songs,” invoking a synagogue’s genizah, a “storeroom of writings / too flawed to be used / but containing the name of God.” Later, she unearths her old attempt, in which love is a different kind of tex...

Niillas Holmberg’s Underfoot is something more than a book of poetry. It is a textual-visual journey into the topography of language, memory, symbolism, loss, forced assimilation, and resilience of the Sámi indigenous people. Composed in Holmberg’s mother tongue of Northern Sámi, the untitled poems appear against undulating illustrations by Sámi artist Inga-Wiktoria Påve. Drawing on the ‘joik’ chants of his people, Holmberg renews primordial...

Cold Nights of Childhood does what excellent contemporary autofiction does – but it first did it, in Turkish, almost half a century ago. Tight in length, but capacious and twisting and sprawling in form, this is a daring work of personal inquiry – of depression, sex, class, paranoia, travel, family, love, death; of everything. This personal disarray witnesses political revolution but refuses to be subsumed by it. And Özlü’s daring work comes to ...

How does one write a sick body that is fast declining, in a state of mind lost in many pasts crumpled together with little grounding in the present moment? By the Rivers of Babylon is a heartbreaking rendition of one such experience that allows us to be with/within the man on the hospital bed, instead of reading about him. In a circular and yet chronological literary style that is at once lucid and hallucinatory, Lobo Antunes, via Jull Costa, offers us ...

Kairos is a story of breakup and repair – an epic exploration of love, brutality, secrecy and destruction at both individual and international scales. The torsions of a messy love affair meet the fall of the Berlin Wall in spiraling, tangling ways; these themes aren’t untrodden ground, but Erpenbeck and Hofmann tread them with such original, surprising, profound feet that they’re revealed anew. Kairos is stunningly bleak and ferociously beautiful ...

The Liar opens with a winter fog that lends a monochromatic grayness to the physical as well as the grief-infused emotional landscape of Sand Island. But the mist is quickly pulled back to reveal the richness of the island’s terrain and inhabitants. The translation perfectly renders the narrator’s voice: a man who pretends to be the ironic outside observer but who sympathizes with the islanders more than he wants to admit. The translation beauti...

In beautiful prose, the journalistic vignettes making up This Is Not Miami explore how the poetry of life in Veracruz, Mexico, is destroyed by unpoetic reality. Melchor’s compassionate stories of everyday people confronting government corruption, officially-sanctioned drug-trafficking, and daily violence underscore how the only beauty left is that of language. Hughes’ sensitive translation maintains the musicality of the various voices doing the sto...

In Traces of Enayat, Iman Mersal becomes a detective in search of the Egyptian author Enayat al-Zayyat. Mersal, through Moger, guides us into many archives of an almost-forgotten past—from oral histories to personal journals to library materials to Cairo’s architectural bodies to ultimately a tombstone. A captivating labyrinthine archive itself, made in front of our eyes, Traces of Enayat is not just about Enayat, but also about Mersal and many othe...

With The World at My Back, author Thomas Melle takes us into the harrowing world of bipolar disorder, chronicling the effect it has had on him and his relationships. Yet he does this with such remarkable aplomb that the reader now laughs, now cries at his predicament. As an author, playwright, and translator, Melle is very much embedded in the cultural life of a German writer, and it is against that backdrop that the episodes swing from manic to depress...

Tankas are 5/7/5/7/7 syllable-count poems, which Tatsuhiko Ishii collapses into a single line and composes into sequences, each leading to or broken by the next. His often homoerotic poetry mingles Eastern and Western ideas and allusions in startling ways: The Book of Genji, The Waste Land, The Inferno, Yukio Mishima, and the Bible jostle with each other, often asyntactically, as translator Hiroaki Sato artfully conveys. Sato does not follow the syllabl...

It’s not surprising that the poems of Wendy Guerra, who grew up, was educated, and worked in television and film in Cuba, are filled with the language of travel: leaving, letting go, rowing, capsizing, abandoning, (the bottomless) suitcase, goodbye, far away. The myriad ways in which the speaker delights in transgressing is surprising. The poems frequently step over the dotted line between the public and private self, which is a convincing argument th...

This translation by Roberta Antognini and Deborah Woodard magnificently mimics the clotted wordplay and knotted rhymes of Amelia Rosselli’s free verse. They also follow the Surrealist and Symbolist techniques and the incantatory repetitions with which Rosselli investigates religion, love, the self, justice, and injustice. Second-rate Surrealists baffle with unredeemed nonsense. Rosselli, in the hands of her translators, startles with unexpected connec...

Lauded for her rendition of The Odyssey, Wilson now takes up the earlier epic The Iliad. As in her earlier translation, Wilson renders the classical Greek’s dactylic hexameter into iambic pentameter, the meter in English she thought would best communicate the effect of hearing the poem in ancient times. Wilson’s rendition is highly dramatic and readable, and she returns to the text some of its original renderings, especially the important emotional ...

On the surface, these poems by the Polish poet, translator, and literary critic, Jerzy Jarniewicz, may seem “user friendly,” in both senses of the word—“appealing” and “easy to understand.” Afterall, diction-wise, they’re consistently colloquial, and their frequent gesturing to contemporary culture—ATM, GPS, Youporn—makes them feel laidback and inclusive. Beneath the surface, however, using his ever-sharp wit and keen intelligence, t...

In long and limber lines, Juan Calzadilla unravels the metropolitan energy of Caracas. The poems (sometimes in justified prose, but more frequently lineated) eschew all punctuation besides the occasional mid-line caesura. This formal quality, combined with the poems explorations of what might be considered the grittier or coarser side of urban life, gives the book a kinetic energy that has its own mimetic impact. The poems of The Roof of the Whale are c...

Zola’s finely crafted 19th-century classic, published by Oxford UP, is a “landmark” of world literature not only because of its original significance, but because this story of a woman’s struggle with alcoholism in the context of poverty, a masterpiece of Naturalism, maintains its social impact in today’s troubled world. A huge translation challenge because of the predominance of local slang, L’Assommoir’s first English translator focu...

A unique glimpse into how the Billy Wilder of Vienna and Berlin evolved into the Billy Wilder of Hollywood. Translator Frisch writes that “Wilder’s prose is wilder”: where else would she “get to write about a smoker whose cigar saunters from one corner of his mouth to the other?” or to translate bons mots like “Coffeehouses have something in common with well-played violins.” This lively translation of Wilder’s early journalism places in ...

“Yes, guys! Our Roger Milla is go, he is, to Mbeng! He told me he wanted boza: that he was going to walk all the way to Europe.” Max Lobe’s A Long Way From Douala, where “a funeral is also a party” is a rollicking ride (literally, being something of a road novel) through modern-day Cameroon, where the heaviness of contemporary realities is dealt with a light hand. The language, studded as it is with Camfranglais—a combination of French a...

This first English translation of Sholom Aleichem’s rediscovered novel Moshkeleh the Thief, published after his death, is a keen vision and raw portrayal of the underside of Jewish life in Eastern Europe. Funny, touching, biting, the stories invite us into the characters’ emotional lives, uncovering complicated power structures. This groundbreaking work paved the way for a more inclusive, more realistic, and less-sentimental approach to describing J...

While the devastations of our climate crisis are measurable, statistics have failed to adequately motivate change. An acclaimed writer and environmental activist makes its scale and scope tangible by sharing tales of his grandparents, Icelandic citizen scientists whose honeymoon was spent surveying the Vatnajokull glacier, when “glaciers were a symbol of something great and eternal, like oceans, mountains, and clouds.” Now Vatnajokull is dying. Weav...

“No one lies at my side but my sword.”

The longest extant medieval Arabic epic, and the only one named for a woman, tells of Fatima, “She of Noble Ambition.” Captured during a raid and raised in servitude, this adept strategist and fierce fighter nevertheless resists marriage and rises to lead armies across Arabian borderlands with her dark-skinned son. Melanie Magidow’s work here marks a significant achievement in not only translation ...

Steeped in mythology, Another Life, the breathtaking debut of poet and translator Daniel Lipara, chronicles a series of events in the history of a family grappling with death. A deeply moving, intimate epic in fifteen parts, free of punctuation, both autobiographical and polyphonic, it is a haunting meditation on love, the sacred, place, memory, hope, and loss. Skillfully captured in Robin Myers’s extraordinary translation, it leaves readers awe-struc...

Despite his brazen, trail-blazing embrace of modernity in all its manifestations, and his experiments in poetic prose, Charles Baudelaire remained a steadfastly traditional versifier. Yet the fact that his flowers of evil are arranged in well-wrought urns only accentuates the frissons of which he is the master. Aaron Poochigian has a gift for making rhymed, metrical lines sound as natural as the seductive banter of a seasoned roué. His elegant Baudelai...

Intimate and conversational, Adalber Salas Hernández’s The Science of Departures is a timely meditation on borders, loss, and exile. At times haunting and haunted, at others infused with a dark humor, these long, descriptive narrative poems remake the familiar into the unfamiliar and render recognizable that which is unknowable to many. Modulating between the poems’ different pitches, their staccato rhythms, and artful cadences, Robin Myers has pro...